Baking: cake disaster

I spend yesterday pottering about the kitchen, and have various recipes to share over the next few days.

While I was making one recipe - a old colleagues' mother's recipe for sultana and tea cake - I started composing a post in my head. About how following other people's recipes' reminded you of them. About how I'd never cooked the recipe before but could remember how delicious the cake he baked was, and why I begged for the recipe.

It seemed perfect - a loaf cake, speckled with sultanas and flavoured with tea and spice. Substantial enough to last a week, wholesome enough for the Husband to have several slices while he's working, but special enough to be fun.

So I put up with a couple of slightly annoying things in the recipe - soaking sultanas in an unspecified amount of tea overnight, and the fact that it needed to bake for 2 hours. The house smelled gorgeous as it baked.

Then I took it out of the oven. I peeked through the baking paper I'd lined the tin with and saw the top, beautifully browned and cracked, with a little steam rising from it. Perfect.

And then for some unknown reason I tried to pull the cake out of the tin by the baking parchment and it all collapsed. And instead of a beautiful cake, I have this.

The hunks I've salvaged taste nice enough, although not as good as I remembered.

But the most annoying thing? When I asked the Husband what cake he wanted this week, he just asked for Blondies. Wish I'd paid him more attention now!